Law, morality, and re-founding of the republic – Part 2

The remedy lies in a People’s Constitution — abolishing the Executive Presidency and restoring parliamentary primacy under a prime minister answerable to the legislature

Abstract

This second part of “No Kings” turns from the social to the institutional, tracing how Sri Lanka’s republican ideal has been hollowed out by judicial compromise, constitutional distortion, and selective enforcement. It revisits the 1988 Fourteenth Amendment and the inertia of the 2023 Anti-Corruption Act to show how law has become theatre while impunity endures. Drawing on Eliot Cohen’s idea of political gravity and David Brooks’s call for moral mobilisation, it argues that reform must join moral clarity, civic organisation, and programmatic precision. The essay concludes with a call for a People’s Constitution — abolishing the Executive Presidency, restoring parliamentary primacy, and re-anchoring the Republic in Cicero’s ideal: law above rulers, not rulers above law.

Bridge from Part 1

In the first part of this series, I argued that Sri Lanka’s political and economic life now bends under a Newtonian-Ciceronian gravity: promises betrayed generate an equal and opposite reaction. This second part turns from the social to the institutional — from public frustration to the structures that sustain it — asking how law became a captive of appetite and what a republican restoration might require.

4. Rule-of-law stress points

The Mt. Lavinia Magistrate’s Court incident crystallised a wider anxiety: that justice is unequal and disciplinary power selective. When citizens see some actors above consequence while others are humiliated by procedure, they mobilise not only against policy but on behalf of principle.

One of the greatest betrayals of the covenants of the executive, Parliament, and judiciary towards the people of Sri Lanka occurred in 1988, and the disjunction between law and practice is nowhere clearer than in the afterlife of the Fourteenth Amendment enacted that year. Article 99A, inserted under executive pressure, allowed defeated or non-contesting candidates to enter Parliament by party nomination — a direct violation of republican equality and the people’s franchise. The Supreme Court, instead of defending the constitutional principle that sovereignty is non-transferable, sanctioned the distortion. That single judicial compromise hollowed out the representative basis of the Republic. More than three decades on, the pattern endures: in the 2024 elections, the AKD administration appointed two defeated candidates to Parliament under the same defective provision while proclaiming a crusade for the rule of law.

Even the Anti-Corruption Act No. 9 of 2023, enacted to harmonise with the United Nations Convention against Corruption, has not altered that reality. Its architecture is impressive on paper, but enforcement remains uneven. The Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) has been largely inert, and the Supreme Court reluctant to confront the constitutional breach that enables this revolving impunity. Thus, while the legal superstructure exists, the moral foundation — the idea that law must bind power before it disciplines the powerless — remains fractured.

As retiring Justice Gamini Amarasekara cautioned in his 2025 valedictory address, the gravest threats to judicial independence now arise not from external coercion but from within — when judges trade conscience for comfort and silence becomes complicity [5].

The erosion of judicial independence, once theoretical, has now entered the realm of documented allegation. A formal complaint lodged before CIABOC on 1 July 2025 alleges that Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya PC and three other Supreme Court judges — Preethi Padman Surasena, S. Thurairaja, and Priyantha Jayawardena — acted in breach of Sections 73, 93, 107 and 111 of the Act [1][2]. The complaint cites failures to recuse from conflicted cases, manipulation of court panels, and selective discipline — acts amounting to the use of judicial office for “improper benefit or advantage.”

That the allegation concerns the apex court reveals the depth of institutional inversion: the very body charged with interpreting the Anti-Corruption Act now stands accused under it. The moral paradox Cicero feared — the guardians of law becoming its violators — has taken literal form. AKD, once hailed as a crusader for the rule of law, has since offered the same Chief Justice — Jayantha Jayasuriya, a figure of tainted reputation — the prestigious post of Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, bypassing the foreign-service route.

The Act’s hollowness is further exposed by its treatment of asset declarations. Though CIABOC has clear authority — under Section 163(1)(e) to receive and examine declarations and Section 163(2) to audit discrepancies — that authority lies dormant. Declarations are filed, stored, and forgotten: rituals of compliance masquerading as instruments of integrity. They remain mere ornaments, like tropical birds flaunting their plumage — a tableau worthy of David Attenborough’s lens.

As the No Kings protests in the United States reaffirmed that law binds rulers as well as citizens, Sri Lanka’s present moment shows not an absence of legal structure but a failure of institutional momentum. Fusing David Brooks’s argument in “America Needs a Mass Movement — Now” (The Atlantic, 14 October 2025) — that grievance becomes civic power only when morally anchored [3] — with the Newtonian and biological metaphors I developed in Daily FT (“Newtonian physics, traditional biology and Sri Lankan politics – Part 2”) [4], we see that the mass of elite privilege continues to absorb the force of law, resisting acceleration, while declarations of wealth act like decorative plumage on political species long mutated.

Worse, enforcement of the Act has taken on a partisan rhythm: selective exposure of opponents validates the ruling party’s moral narrative while shielding its allies. To wield law as theatre is to empty it of meaning. What should affirm justice instead parades as propaganda — a spectacle of integrity masking a culture of impunity.

This fracture marks the pivot from legality to appetite, from the Republic as res publica to the presidency as res privata. It is here that Cicero and Cato’s ancient warning acquires modern force.

Cicero warned that judicial corruption is the most insidious tyranny because it hides private interest in the robes of virtue. When judges turn law into a tool for institutional preservation, they enact what he called “the betrayal of the Republic by its own guardians.”

5. Institutional memory

The Aragalaya repertoire did not vanish. It lies dormant, ready to be recalled by any mix of economic shock, opacity, or judicial partiality. Gravity works on habits as much as headlines.

David Brooks’s essay “America Needs a Mass Movement — Now” shows how grievances can mature into moral mobilisation. He warns that without a disciplined, values-centred movement, democracies sink into autocracy through resignation, not revolution. Applied to Sri Lanka, Brooks’s insight underscores that grievance alone does not create renewal; it must be organised and moralised to counter the cynicism that sustains elite dominance [3].

Brooks frames mobilisation as a three-fold task — moral clarity, organisational density, and programmatic specificity — each relevant to Sri Lanka’s predicament.

Moral clarity – The claim is not partisan but constitutional: no secret deals, no selective justice, and no collective punishment through fiscal adjustment without social floors. This is Cicero’s virtue politics in modern form — the belief that a republic’s health depends on truth as common property, not a monopoly of power.

Organisational density – Unions, student bodies, professional associations, faith communities, women’s groups, and provincial networks must federate. Without this lattice, protest days exhaust themselves. Organisation converts indignation into civic architecture — the social equivalent of Cohen’s political gravity pulling power back into law’s orbit.

Programmatic specificity – Tie institutional repair to material relief: fair taxation, targeted protection for the vulnerable, transparent publication of agreements, auditable asset declarations, and safeguarded protest rights. Linking these reforms converts outrage into order — a transition from burst to blueprint, from anger to authorship.

6. Cicero and Cato in Colombo: Law vs. Appetite

Placed in a Ciceronian frame, Sri Lanka’s crisis is not only economic but moral. Since 1978 the presidency has served less as restraint than armour, each administration rehearsing the same supremacy — the will of the ruler over the rule of law.

The current presidency intensifies this through a weekly theatre of diversion: staged unveilings and choreographed announcements that shift attention from scrutiny to spectacle. The result is res privata displacing res publica — laws as performance, not restraint.

Cicero warned that judicial corruption is the most insidious tyranny because it hides private interest in the robes of virtue. When judges turn law into a tool for institutional preservation, they enact what he called “the betrayal of the Republic by its own guardians.”

In today’s Sri Lanka, where allegations against the Chief Justice must pass through structures he controls, the line between res publica and res privata vanishes. The Mt. Lavinia episode thus matters beyond its facts: it is a parable. Where law is displayed rather than applied, where process humiliates the weak and shields the well-connected, the Republic’s guardians become its narrators. Once law reflects the ruler instead of restraining him, citizenship thins into clientship.

7. Why a Sri Lankan “No Kings” is plausible

On present trajectories, Sri Lanka holds all the ingredients for broad, peaceful mobilisation.

Trigger conditions: a harsh budget without legitimacy, opacity over strategic deals, and justice controversies revealing unequal treatment.

Bridging narrative: sovereignty through legality, not noise — the refrain: same law for all, same truth for all, same sacrifice for all.

Movement mechanics: non-violence training, legal-defence cells, detainee tracking, rights hotlines, community kitchens and childcare for strike days, decentralised hubs, and document-watch teams for MoUs, tenders, and appointments.

Do these things and protest becomes constitutional pedagogy — citizens teaching institutions how to behave. That is the Ciceronian answer to personality politics and propaganda: refuse the theatre, insist on the law.

8. Closing turn: Political gravity will do its work

Cohen shows why overreach cannot float forever; Brooks shows how societies turn shock into structure. Sri Lanka must decide whether gravity acts through disorder — sudden eruptions that burn and fade — or through ordered civic power.

Political gravity cannot work where moral gravity is suspended. The CIABOC complaint is more than a legal filing; it is a civic test. Ignored, it will confirm that Sri Lanka’s institutions have entered the Ciceronian stage of decay — law sanctifying appetite, guardians becoming gravediggers.

Constitutional change by necessity

The 1978 Constitution demands a two-thirds majority and referendum for reform — thresholds that shield presidents from restraint. Yet when legality obstructs legitimacy, change can arise by necessity. History shows constitutions replaced not by decree but by popular authorship. A charter born from a broad civic mandate and endorsed by a simple-majority referendum could claim legitimacy as sovereign renewal. From Tunisia to South Africa, such transitions prove that when people refound their republic, law follows freedom.

FT Link

Part 1 of this article can be seen at https://www.ft.lk/opinion/From-No-Kings-to-No-Clients-Political-and-economic-gravity-Part-1/14-783527

A People’s Constitution: From Presidency to Prime Ministership

To reverse decay, Sri Lanka must look beyond personalities to structure. The 1978 framework, fortified by executive entrenchment, cannot reform itself; power rarely yields voluntarily. The remedy lies in a People’s Constitution — abolishing the Executive Presidency and restoring parliamentary primacy under a prime minister answerable to the legislature.

A People’s Congress, representing every local division and community, could meet annually to deliberate on the nation’s course. Members would serve honorarily, compensated only for service, not patronage. Those implicated in corruption or complicity with the current order should be barred constitutionally from national office.

Such a settlement would turn protest into authorship — citizens not merely resisting rulers but refounding the Republic. In that moment, Sri Lanka would realise Cicero’s ideal of a commonwealth: the people’s affair, governed by reason and bound by justice.

Footnotes:

[1] Complaint lodged with the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC), 1 July 2025, alleging breach of Sections 73, 93, 107 and 111 of the Anti-Corruption Act No. 9 of 2023.

[2] YouTube video reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAiXGGcU19c

[3] David Brooks, “America Needs a Mass Movement — Now,” The Atlantic, 14 October 2025.

[4] Jayalath Bandara Adikarige, “Newtonian physics, traditional biology and Sri Lankan politics – Part 2,” Daily FT, 1 May 2025. https://www.ft.lk/columns/Newtonian-physics-traditional-biology-and-Sri-Lankan-politics-Part-2/4-776033

[5] Justice Gamini Amarasekara, Farewell Address, Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, February 2025; reported in Daily Mirror, 12 February 2025.

(The writer is a political economist and columnist specialising in law, governance, and moral psychology. A former lecturer at the University of Peradeniya, he has published extensively in the Daily FT and continues to explore Sri Lanka’s evolving political and institutional landscape through analytical and interdisciplinary lenses. He can be contacted at [email protected].)